1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image display apparatus and, more particularly, to an image display apparatus having a fixed display screen resolution such as a liquid crystal display panel or a plasma display panel.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, display panels such as liquid crystal and plasma display panels have been seeing technical innovation and price reduction, and portable personal computers employing these display panels are used extensively. Such a personal computer employs an image display apparatus using a display panel having a fixed display screen resolution.
Since there are various image display apparatuses, there are a great variety of personal computer software including those which were developed in the past. As a result of technical advancement of display media, however, the display screen resolution (i.e., raster line number of the display image of characters and drawings) for software that was developed in the past is generally low compared to the display screen resolution for newly developed software. Therefore, there are a plurality of different display screen resolutions for software utilized in respective different personal computers. However, since a display panel has a fixed display screen resolution, when it is used to operate software having a display screen having a lower resolution, the display screen is reduced in size compared to the screen size of the display panel. For example, when a display panel having a resolution of 640 dots (horizontal) by 480 dots (vertical) is used for display for a software image screen having a resolution of 640 dots by 350 dots, the display screen size is reduced to 350/480 (i.e., about 73%). In other words, the display can not be seen well even if a high resolution display panel is used.